Anobit acquisition could be the biggest purchase of a hardware maker in Apple's history

Apple, Inc. (AAPL) can't hide its love flash. Apple is immersed in a over decade long passionate affair with NAND flash memory, which it uses for storage across all of its mobile devices and in its computer SSDs.

I. Apple Pulls an OCZ

Now Apple is reportedly in talks to absorb a major part of its flash supply chain, and is reportedly in talks to purchase Israeli flash memory fabless chipmaker Anobit.

Anobit is a small firm founded in 2006 in Herzeliya Pituach -- an affluent beach-side district on central Israel's Mediterranean coast. Today the company operates subsidiaries in the U.S. and South Korea. Its core business is the tiny chips that allow super-fast, reliable access to flash memory, flash memory controllers.

Apple already licenses Anobit's controllers for use in its iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air.

A good flash controller is incredibly valuable to SSD makers or companies who use flash components in their devices. Just ask OCZ Technology Group Inc. (OCZ), whose SSDs have been dominating the enthusiast market, thanks to their slick Indilinx controller, which suffers little of the bugginess of LSI Corp. (LSI) subsidiary SandForce's controllers.

OCZ apparently found the South Korean controller maker Indilinx so invaluable that it bought it (and its 20 patents) for $32M USD in stock. This purchase was followed in turn by LSI's $322M USD acquisition of SandForce, a deal driven by SandForce's broad market base, which offset its poor controller stability.

Now Apple is expected to follow in suit, potentially folding in Anobit to prevent competitors from gaining access to its technology. News of the deal broke [translated] from the the Israeli publication Calcalist.

Reportedly the acquisition price could hit as high as $400M-$500M USD, a boon for Anobit investors, who have thus far poured $97M USD in venture capital into the startup. The acquisition would also grant Apple control of Anobit's 21 patents (and the 74 more currently in the submissions process).

Anobit has a very valuable specialty, which could drive Apple to make the purchase. Reportedly, its technology for detecting "bad" memory cells in MLC (multi-level cell) flash memory is the best in the industry. That allows cheap MLC to replicate the typically far-better endurance of expensive SLC (single-level cell) flash. Long-term longevity is still a concern for flash drives, so this is a very valuable technology.

That comes in handy for Anobit's enterprise offerings, which promise "4 Terabytes write per day for 5 years". With Apple increasingly deploying storage-heavy large-scale data centers to support technologies like the iCloud, this could come in handy. If the reliability issues could be removed, Apple could switch its servers over to using solid state drives (flash prices allowing) removing one more piece of the latency equation for its cloud users.

The core specs on Anobit's embedded controller (used in the aforementioned MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone) are pretty sweet to:

666 MB/s data transfers

Works with up to 256 GB / 16 dies of NAND

"Ultra low" power consumption

Support for 20nm and sub-20nm NAND

Dual host interface (provides faster data piping to the rest of the system)

Anobit claims its controller is the "highest performance" tablet or smartphone flash storage controller. We're sure some other companies would disagree with that assessment, but it's at least safe to say that Anobit is no performance slouch.

Anobit is a fabless firm, which means it lacks chip production capacity of its own, instead paying third parties chip fabricators like GlobalFoundries Inc. to actually put its proprietary designs onto chips.

We'll keep you updated if Apple goes through with its reported plan to fold in this crucial piece of its flash supply chain.

quote: After years of inferior product, sagging earnings, recent unexplained multiple continent outages and product delays, RIM executives this week capped off a disastrous 2011 with more bad news. The company shattered any hope of seriously competing with iOS and Android in 2012 with the news that their Blackberry 10 smartphones, originally slated for "early 2012" are delayed until late 2012 (read: 2013). The company also took an un-needed PR hit last week when two drunk executives were forced off a flight for being violently and ridiculously drunk. The reality-TV meets AOL level of total dysfunction has more than a few people wondering exactly how RIM co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie still have jobs.

IOS was intro's in early 2007 and released in June 2007. Even slow as molasses Palm came out with a competing offer 2 years later (WebOS) - and they are totally disfunctional. Its now been almost 5 years and RIM still has no Phone OS to match.

Beyond that, what is taking them so long with QNX. It WAS released on the playbook earlier this year in at least decent form. Its not getting great reviews, but it is a good OS with alot of promise. What is taking 1 1/2 years from Playbooks working QNX release to get it on a freegin phone? WTF!!! , by the time they release it, we may not be looking at IOS6 and Android 5 like I originally thought... We will be looking at IOS7 and Android 6.

"Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." -- Bill Gates